I’m Playing Sonic the Hedgehog and my Town is Shutting Down. I Think the Game is Causing this.
I’m hiding in my bathroom now. Why won’t the sun go up?! I’m afraid… Writing seems to calm me down a little bit, but the intruding thoughts are increasing and the compulsions are growing. I’m going to try and tell you – whoever you are – what has happened to me. My childhood wasn’t happy and I could mention many things as an example of it. One example has turned up to be more relevant than all the others though… You see, a long time ago – when I was only eight years old – I begged my parents for a game console, SNES to be exact. Everyone else – or at least the kids I looked up to – had one. This made me feel like I was missing out, and I was right! Everyone was talking about Super Mario and I didn’t know what they were talking about. My parents, however, didn’t know anything about modern life. They were both academics. My mom studied to become a librarian at the time and my dad was a professor in ancient religions. They spent most of their time reading old books from the beginning of time, so of course they didn’t understand my yearning for video games. It didn’t help that they were strict and didn’t want me to waste my time on games. They kept telling me that I had to work hard so that I could live up to my so-called potential. If I had a nickel for every time they – especially my dad – spoke of my potential I would’ve been able to buy my own video games many times over. I never understood, and still don’t understand, what convinced them I had such potential. I didn’t perform well at school and I didn’t have any talents. Also, I hated everything my parents were doing. I just wanted to be able to play Super Mario and watch cartoons. Still, my parents remained certain of my great potential. Perhaps it was merely their hopes and dreams as parents that made them talk about it so much. Sometimes, when they were really upset with me for not doing as I was told, they even said I had to think about my destiny. My mom always had to comfort my dad when he started to yell his nonsense at my face. I was just about to give up on my dream of ever getting a SNES when, at Christmas, I received a large package. Its shape and size could only mean one thing. My heart started beating rapidly when I saw it under the Christmas tree. I almost couldn’t contain myself, but of course my parents forced me to wait forever before I got to open my gifts. I had to sit through the seemingly everlasting dinner that they had made, not for our relatives – I never knew my grandparents or extended family – but for their weird friends who all looked like they came from another, older, time. After dinner, when I thought I would finally be allowed to open my presents, I had to wait even more while they were all discussing some strange book one of my parent's friends gave them. It felt like it took forever – even though it probably wasn’t that late – before I got to open my Christmas presents. And, of course I had to open all the other presents first – not that there were that many – pretending to care about them when all I was thinking about was that large package wrapped in starry gift paper. One of my parent's friends, a tall man with dark eyes, gave me a gift as well. It was a pocketbook. I tried my hardest to not look disappointed. “It’s Homer’s Margites,” he said. “I found it on one of my voyages, very far away from here.” My parents got super excited about it for some reason and then they all kind of laughed at how cute I looked when I thanked the man while not even looking at the damn book. After that, it was finally time for the last gift – the big one! I looked at my parents with true love in my eyes for the first time in a long time and then – to more laughter – I ripped the wrapping paper away in a frenzy. The carton started to show and I got more and more excited. Until I saw it… A SEGA Genesis. Never before in my entire life have I gone from happy to disappointed so quickly. “What’s wrong? It’s what you wanted,” my mother said, her voice filled with love. I couldn’t bare myself to tell her the truth. She truly believed she had bought me what I had wished for. I pretended the tears that came running down my cheeks was tears of happiness and then I hugged her, saying thank you many times over although I hadn’t gotten what I wanted. Most likely, she had gone to the store – stressed, as it would’ve been far outside of her comfort zone – and nervously asked the clerk for a game console, any game console, and then just bought what she was shown. During that Christmas night, I convinced my mom that she had bought me the right gift, but the following weeks she noticed that I rarely used it. I played Sonic The Hedgehog a couple of times, but I was too disappointed – and proud, I guess – to let myself enjoy it. My dad saw it too and yelled at me for being ungrateful. This lead to a fight and I said some nasty things. The one that hurt them the most – mostly my mom – was that they had bought the wrong thing. I could see in my mom's face she felt guilty, filled with regret for not having succeeded in making her son happy. My dad became furious, as always when I hurt my mom somehow, and carried the SEGA Genesis down to the basement. That was the last time I saw it as a kid. I stopped asking for the SNES, and in the end, I never got it. During the time I grew up my relationship with my parents got worse and worse. They kept talking about my great destiny, but when I turned 25 and still didn’t have anything to show for I could see the doubt in their eyes when they said it. After I turned 30, they stopped talking about it all together. I constantly felt like a disappointment near my parents. I got a shitty job as a telemarketer, luckily found a small apartment in a rather poor area and moved away from home. After that, I only visited my parents for special occasions. My dad was always annoyed when I met him, but my mom seemed to love me even after I didn’t turn out the way they wanted. Not too long ago, when my mom came to visit me, I asked her what my dad had wanted me to do with my life. I already knew he had wanted me to become an intellectual like himself, but with all his talk about my potential and destiny, I always felt like he wanted me to become something specific. “He always wanted you to carry on with… with the collection. He wanted you to be worthy of the task.” “You mean his books?” “You should talk with your father about it, I don’t think he wants me to go behind his back about this. Just talk to him and he will explain. Perhaps it isn’t too late!” I could see a ray of hope in my mom's eyes, although it was hidden under a layer of sadness. I tried to get her to say more, but she just avoided my questions. Weeks, even months, passed as I considered asking my dad about it. I had recently started to feel bad for wasting so much time of my life and finally wanted to do something meaningful with it. That’s why I had asked my mom about my so-called destiny and why I decided to ask my dad about it as well in the end. However, I never got the chance to do that. One month ago from today, I received the terrible news that both my parents had been killed in their own home. To everyone's puzzlement, their bodies couldn’t be found anywhere. I asked how they knew they had been killed, although when I got the answer I wished I’d never asked. Apparently, someone had violently ripped… It makes me wanna throw up just typing this out, God… Their faces had been torn off and nailed to one of the walls, both with unnaturally huge grins on them. Clearly, they had been murdered by someone extremely brutal. However, there was no sign of a break in. Whoever committed the crime had been let in by my parents, which made the police speculate that it might’ve been someone they knew. The police asked me if they had any enemies, but I didn’t know. I told them they lived secluded lives and that it was unlikely for them to have any enemies. Next, the police asked me if I knew who their friends were. I told them about the people they had invited for some of the holidays when I grew up, but I couldn’t tell them anything more than some of their first names. I always thought they had been my parent's co-workers, but apparently, the police had questioned their colleagues and none of them seemed to have known my parents outside of work. This baffled me as well as the police, since no-one seemed to know who their friends had been. I was brought down to the station a few days later to look at one of my parent's address books. Apparently, no one could figure out its contents. There weren’t any phone numbers or addresses in it, just columns with seemingly random numbers and letters. My best guess, which I told the police, was that it had to do with my parents work. The police tried to encourage me that they were going to solve the case, but I could tell by the way they were looking at me that they didn’t even know where to begin. In the end, I turned out to be the one who found the first real clue. This was… honestly, I don’t know how long ago it was now. How long have I been sitting in my bathroom? I’m afraid I won’t be alive long enough to find any more clues. After the police were done investigating the crime scene, they let me enter my parent's house to manage their belongings. It was with a heavy heart I entered it. I wasn’t exactly ready, but I also felt I wanted it over with. The police had cleaned up the place, but to my horror, I could still see a hint of blood on the wall where I had been told that my parent's faces had hung. I cringed and quickly looked away. Still, the picture of the vague blood stains resembling twisted roman masks got stuck in my head. I considered leaving, but my sorrow made me stay where I could still sense their familiar scent. I had no clue what to do with their stuff. Some of the furniture probably had some value, but it would feel weird to sell it. I didn’t need any of them either, though. Even if I did, I probably wouldn’t have kept it given the traumatic end my parents met. I didn’t want to be reminded every time I used one of their furniture. I considered having it all thrown away, not in disrespect but to make it easier for me to put all of this behind me. Suddenly, I remembered the basement. My parents had kept most of their books there. They called it their library. I never cared for their books, but I wasn’t going to throw them away. Even I wasn’t that stupid. I opened the door that led to the staircase down to the basement. At the same time, I heard a distant thunder. It surprised me since the weather was supposed to be clear all week. As soon as I turned the light on a few moths woke up and started circling the dull orange lamp in the ceiling. The stairs creaked when I walked down. The smell of old books rose from beneath and it instantly filled my mind with memories from my childhood, not exactly happy ones but they still made me feel a bit more comfortable somehow. I thought about the old book I had been given that Christmas when I was only eight years old and tried to remember what happened to it, but I couldn’t. When I reached the bottom of the stairs I discovered something that confused me. The shelves – and there were many of them – that had been filled with books now lay completely empty. My first thought was that the police had brought them to the station as evidence, but then why didn’t they tell me about it? The second thought that entered my mind was that the perpetrator – or perpetrators – had stolen the books. As I walked further into the basement, I noticed that a few items had been left behind. For example, there was an antique Chinese vase standing in a corner. Since it was valuable, I assumed there hadn’t been a robbery. After all, who would leave something expensive behind and just steal some old books? And then I saw it, in one of the bottom shelves. My old Genesis! It was covered in dust. Clearly, no one had touched it since my dad put it there during our fight. It all felt so long ago now and yet at the same time as recent as the day before. Although I regret it now more than anything, I decided to bring it home with me that night. I felt like it held a piece of my mom's love, somehow… The love that had made her leave her safe space among the books and venture out into the modern world just to buy the game for me. I felt guilty for my childish inability to enjoy her gift, so I thought I ought to play it now when I was mature enough to appreciate what she had done for the child she so clearly loved, albeit in her own way. The game wouldn’t have worked on my own TV so I had to take my parent's old TV with me as well. I put it all in my car and drove home. I live pretty far away so it was around midnight when I came home. The storm I heard earlier grew stronger in the horizon on my drive home and when I got inside my apartment it had engulfed the entire city. As I connected the old TV to the wall, lightning illuminated the apartment in the same instance as the thunder roared above. I didn’t even flinch, I was too focused on what I was doing. I turned on the TV to see if it worked. The first thing that came on was our local news channel, which must have been the last channel my parents watched before… I quickly put that thought out of my mind. On the news, they were reporting on the weather: “…and it’s important that everyone stays inside. The local police and firefighters will be helping people unable to get home from their jobs or…” A moment of silence while the news anchor seemed to get new information in her earpiece. “It–it appears that there has been a development… The police are saying that they have finally localized the source of the loud noise that has been repeating for several hours downtown. It’s apparently coming from…” I changed to channel 4. It was time for me to play Sonic the Hedgehog for the first time since I was a kid. I didn’t see anything wrong with the game while the SEGA-logo played, but an unsettling feeling suddenly came over me. And then, when the title screen appeared, I noticed what I assumed must have been a bug in the game. Sonic was gone. I knew he was supposed to appear in the winged ring, but it remained completely empty, nothing more than a pitch black hole. Also, all I could hear from the TV was a deafening, glitchy, screech. I assumed something must have gone wrong, so I reached down, turned off the game and blew on the back of the cassette. It didn’t work. I could feel a drop of sweat running down my face. It was as if the temperature inside my apartment had suddenly gone up, or perhaps I was just feverish. After rebooting the game, the title screen looked the same. I pressed start, thinking the game might turn to normal as soon as I began playing it. I was wrong. The music to the first level – Green Hill Zone – started playing. Although… it didn’t sound right, not at all as I remembered it. The melody was distorted somehow like it was out of tune. It almost hurt to listen to and it instantly made my unsettling feeling worse. When the level appeared, it looked normal, except… Sonic was green and partly transparent. Confused, I leaned in closer to the TV to get a better look, when suddenly – as the thunder rumbled outside – Sonics death animation played ten times in a row in quick succession. I jolted back in surprise. My unsettling feeling had turned into a deep fear I couldn’t really explain. But that wasn’t all. I know it sounds strange, but I sensed something coming from the game. It was a collection of feelings; of regret and anger but most importantly… a feeling of inescapable dread. This didn’t feel just like a bug anymore, although I didn’t dare considering what else it could possibly be. Instead, I tried to convince myself that I was going mad. I shook my head vigorously to get the dark feelings out of me but it didn’t have any effect. It made me feel sick to my stomach to see the game like this. Just seeing the green color of Sonic made me want to puke my guts out. And that music, that fucking music! And yet, something compelled me to play the game. As if a part of me thought that I deserved this appalling experience. Sonic hadn’t lost any lives even though he had just died ten times over. With sweaty hands, I used the controller to move around in the game and for each centimeter I moved, the sense of dread seemed to increase. The sound Sonic made when he jumped felt like a knife cutting into my brain. And the enemies… it was as if each and every one of them represented some long-forgotten sin I had committed in the past. Yes, that’s it! The game was judging me. I came to think about my parents – my disappointed dad and my sorrowful mom – and the thought of them somehow aligned with the feelings I sensed coming from the game. One of those feelings was shame. The more I played the game, the more I came to hate myself for something I couldn’t put into words. I paused the game and got up from my chair to try and clear my head. The room felt colder than usual now, as opposed to way too hot as it was just moments ago. The rain drummed against the windows. I looked outside. My view faced the center of the city. It felt somewhat comfortable to see the golden, electric light stretch out in front of me all the way to the horizon. A couple of helicopters were hovering over the city center and I could hear sirens in the distance. Then, in an instant, everything went dark to the sound of a lightning strike somewhere nearby. The light in my ceiling also went out, but I wasn’t left in darkness. I turned around, and to my utter horror I saw that, although the electricity was out in the entire city, my TV was still on. Hesitantly, I returned to the chair and sat down. I pressed start, anxiously. In the darkness, all I could see was the game. Everything else – the city, the apartment – disappeared in the blackness around me. I played for a long time, but it didn’t seem to matter for how long I did it… I could never seem to reach the end of the level. And the longer I played, the more frantic and obsessed I became with trying. I couldn’t stop! The level just went on and on and on. The hills, the loops, the platforms… It never ended. After an unknown amount of hours – shouldn’t the sun have gone up by now? – I felt something sticky on my fingers. Looking down, I saw that it was blood. I could even smell it. And, honestly, I couldn’t tell if it was my own or if it had somehow come from within the controller. Flashes of my mothers face – twisted in agony – entered my mind. I quickly stood up and screamed as loud as I could in both frustration and panic. I wanted to throw the game out the window – out into that compact darkness outside – but I couldn’t! Something – or was it someone? – prohibited me from doing it. Instead, I ran into the bathroom. That’s where I’m hiding right now, writing this on my phone. I can still hear the horrible music from the game in my living room. I’m getting more disgusting flashes in my mind, pictures of my parents getting their faces cut off while they are still alive. And it is me… it is me cutting them off. I somehow know now that it might as well have been me doing it myself. It’s my fault, oh God, it’s my fault, it’s my fault, it’s my fuckin’ fault! I know there’s only one way to make it stop. Either I continue to play the game or I jump out of the window, joining the everlasting darkness outside. Either way, I don’t think I’m going to survive this seemingly never-ending night. The battery on my phone is about to die, and soon I am as well. I’m thinking of my parents. I should’ve listened to them, then nothing of this would have happened. I understand that now. I’m sorry… Oh my God, I’m sorry! Category:Fanfic Category:Creepypasta